Weekly review #10

Okay this week was pretty short in Intro to Publications. The reason being is we spent most of our classes working on our e-portfolios. I will link mine here. This week we  only did terms and a few little activities on scams. So as you can probably tell this blog will be incredibly short. Our terms for this week just like every other week correspond with what we are learning. They are as follows: Scam, Identity theft, Vulnerable, and Phishing.

So as always I will start with defining our terms this week.

Scam-An attempt to trick someone, usually with the intention of stealing money or private information. People who do this are, but are not limited to, the creepy hobo down the street who is actually rich off handouts so doesn't really need money, hackers, and people who send you e-mail with viruses attached and steal your information.

Identity theft- A type of crime in which your private information is stolen and used for criminal activity. 95% of the time this is what happens after people scam you. It can lead to bills for loans, car payments on vehicles you don't own, and lifelong debt.

Vulnerable- In a position that makes it easier for you to be harmed or attacked. If you don't have any type of spyware/malware, then get it, until you do then you are vulnerable.

Phishing- When people send you phony emails, pop-up messages, social media messages, texts, calls, or links to fake websites in order to hook you into giving out your personal and financial information. This is what hackers do once they have your information(obviously they won't have all of it or else they wouldn't be asking for your information.)

                                               two people fishing, found here,3/18/09
All of these things are involved when people are trying to steal your information to buy other things, and not have to worry about the bills.

We also learned some pretty creative ways to spot fake emails. I will list three below.

• If it has a sense of urgency.
• If it says your account is in trouble.
• If it is just too good to be true.

If an email has just one of these things just ignore it, or if you are worried that they will shut down your account then call customer support and ask them to verify the information.

To help us spot fake emails we played a cool little game here, but because I'm nice I will embed it below.




So that's all for this week come back next week for yet another riveting tale of what we do every week.